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We started our discussion talking about parts in the book that we had just read. We talked about the importance of Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford and how Winston realizing that they were bad and plotting against the party ten years ago. It planted the seed in Winston's head to get him thinking about the party and how bad it truly is to him and the people around him. We spoke about how Charrington and possibly O'Brian is kind of like a figure that may be a mentor to Winston seeing as he was speaking about the past as he remembers it. Katie then made the connecting to Montag and Faber in F451. Montag knows that Faber can help him with the stopping of the book burnings as Winston is with O'Brian thinking he has a connection and with going back to the store and meeting Charrington. This book has a bunch of foreshadowing that we can see and repetition of the same ideas coming up. We have questions still about the way the society runs and we want to see what becomes of the girl that is following Winston. Until next time....HAVE A GREAT DAY!

The group talked about several things today. Here is a list of the topics

1) Do humans or robots respect the other more? Some points brought up about this were that robots are forced to respect the humans because of the 3 laws, humans don’t respect robots because they take them for granted like Powell and Donovan do, but in some cases, like that of Gloria, humans respect the robots because they think of the robots as humans.

2) Is the robots’ use of the term “Yes master” mockery or respect? Here, one comment was that it was neither because the robot is a machine so it is programmed to respond this way. The other main response was that the robots were using this term because they know they have better intellectual capacities than humans, so it was mockery.

3) Is Powell and Donovan’s suspicion towards the robots justified? This was responded to by saying that the humans are scared of the robots because humans kept creating better and better robots, so now the robots may be planning something because they are better than humans.

4) Furthermore, we talked about how the time setting has jumped back and forth because it moves around a lot, and it is good to understand it. We also talked about the format of the final project and formulated some excellent as to how we could argue towards getting iRobot approved for the LPS reading list.

We have finished Anthem. We began our discussion by thinking about what the Unspeakable Word was. It seems like it may be "ego", but we decided that perhaps it was only a word that the man (now Prometheus) praised, and not the Unspeakable Word. We are still somewhat convinced that the word was "I" or "me".

We then began talking about how the supposedly "equal" society actually was forming into a social class system. The council members seemed to think they were far above the other men. Then, Blake brought up a pretty far-fetched theory about how the whole story was about genetically altered beetles and that they all lived underground. The Unmentionable Times was made of normal beetles, that weren't genetically altered. As interesting this conspiracy theory was, the rest of us didn't agree with Blake...

Then we discussed the possible symbolism in the names they had chosen for themselves, Prometheus and Gaea. Equality 7-2521 decided Prometheus because he is going to bring his electricity to others, and he is going to lead others to become individuals, as Prometheus the God taught others to become Gods too. Then he chose Gaea for Liberty 5-3000 because the God was the "Mother of all Gods", and as Prometheus led others to become gods and Liberty is his wife, she is then leader with him.

Finally, we discussed why Ayn Rand wrote Anthem. It seemed, from her Forward in the beginning, she believed that society is moving towards collectivism. She wrote this book to warn us about what society's coming to. Emma thinks somewhat the opposite though. She thinks that society is building towards too much of the individual and selfishness, that eventually our society will fall apart from not working together at all, and then we will form a complete collective society. Although I can see what she means, I don't think that's how Ayn Rand saw it.

We started our discussion with talk of our final project and the format and content of it all. We also discussed many underlying themes, settings, characteristics. We made similarities to practically all of the previous books we have read so far. Such as Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, and the Pedestrian. We also drew similarities to the Vault, and WWII. An underlying theme we found was War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignornace is strength. There are still things we haven't fully understanded yet, like a lot of the characters, but it is mostly coming together well.

We talked about each of the five chapters we have read so far. In the chapters with Donovan and Powell, we compared their actions and the importance of what they were doing. We also compared how the chapters showed the progressive advancement of robots and its significance to the story. We asked our selves whether there was anything in each chapter that would be reasonb for it to not be approved, and insofar as we can determine, there is no reason. It shows insight into human character though, in how we see the different characters react to different robots. It shows that humans think robots inferior, since we created them, and that humans do not believe robots deserve the same basic rights as we do. We also discussed our project and how we could present our evaluation and what we would say. We toook into account common prejudices that have caused books to be banned in the past, and determined there is insufficient reason of any kind to ban this book. We did not decide on a minimum grade level though, or a mian reason to read it as we have not yet finished the book.

Today in discussion we addressed the illegal beer drinking taking place in the book and how we could possibly get it's approval from the administrators. Also we touched on the distinctly un-American plot implications and hints of anarchy, and how we may make it look like less of a problem. We spoke a little bit of the sexual passages in the book and how very, very difficult it will be to get approval on such subjectsWe came to a stance that if drugs and sex can be openly discussed in a safe enviorment, and therefore by reading being a safe way to gain knowledge on the subject. Additionally, pointing out thaty these sorts of things are not like things we've never heard before.

We continued discussing the basic plot of the book and what we thought inspired Orwell to write it. We all still agreed that his idea of the future was very exaggerated and unrealistic. We also thought that maybe this book was a kind of eye-opener to the world from Orwell to show that if people start to lose themselves and forget what is important and just the world could turn this way. We also began discussing material we thought might be considered controversial, we think that 9th grade and up is a good age group for reading this book. Also we made a chart of the characters and setting. Our group continues to hope the book picks up pace a little bit but we think it will do that soon. :)